Nestled in an ancient forest above Seaview Estates in
Lower Puna is one of the most unusual farms on the Big
Island. In addition to citrus and mangoes, avocadoes and
coconuts, Bellyacres grows jugglers and clowns.

"You can think of this as a farm, or as a collection of
jugglers and performers, but what this really is, is a
social experiment," says juggler Graham Ellis, on of
Bellyacres' permanent residents. The farm is owned by a hui
of 30 circus-type performers from around the world.

Some live on the land there; Henrik Bothe, for instance,
has moved his family into a farm dwelling among Bellyacres'
palm trees and mangoes, and gives weekly performances on the
cruise ship M.S. Independence. Other hui members are only
occasional guests. But all have pledged membership in the
hui for life.

"You can leave, but you're still a member," explains
Ellis. "We have people who leave for five, eight--we even
had one individual who was gone for ten years, then showed
up again..."

The farm serves as home to Hawaii's Volcano Circus, a
non-profit organization dedicated to promoting "the healthy
development of children and the community through the
time-honored skills of the circus." Every February for the
past fifteen years, circus members and other performers have
held the International Circus Arts Festival on the Big
Island--first at Kalani Honua Retreat Center in Puna, and
later at Spencer Beach Park in North Kohala. This year,
unfortunately, the festival will be held for the first time
on Oahu, simply because it has outgrown available facilities
here. For the past two years, the group has also held
benefits for the Palace Theater in Hilo. The first year, the
show at the Palace was headlined by the world-famous Flying
Karamozov Brothers, one of whose members is a Bellyacres
co-owner.

But Bellyacres may be best known as the home base for the
Hiccup Circus, which Ellis runs.

Hiccup Circus performers annually invade at least three
East Hawaii schools. The next visit will be to the
Connections Charter School in Mountain View on the week of
January 22-26. "We're going to be using circus in English,
geography, math...have it be a theme for a week," says
Ellis.

Ellis also teaches "juggle for success" classes, using
juggling as a "front" to "teach students to overcome their
fear of failure". Instead of balls or clubs, he starts the
kids with "scarves, because they're less intimidating."
Would be amateur jugglers can come to a bi-weekly course the
he teaches in Hawaii Paradise Park. But students with
professional juggling aspiration must make the pilgrimage to
Bellyacres.

Shannon Hassard is one of those students. Currently
working as a lawn mower for The Arc, a vocational
rehabilitation center in Hilo, Shannon plans soon to debut
his professional juggling act for birthday parties and other
local events. In the living room of Ellis's home--which,
like most buildings in Bellyacres, has a rather high
ceiling--Ellis helps Hassard polish his technique with a
range of juggler's paraphernalia, from balls and pins to
spinning plates and cigar boxes. They practice flipping a
hat in the air and catching it on their heads. (The secret
isn't getting under the hat at the right time, so much as it
is making sure that the hat does precisely the right number
of mid-air flips, so the brim side is down when it meets the
head). Ellis demonstrates the "Diablo"--an hourglass-shaped
object that spins back and forth on a cord between two
hand-held wands, like a cross between a spinning top and a
yo-yo.

"Juggling doesn't just involve three balls," observes
Ellis. "Juggling is really the art of manipulation."

There's a surprising amount to learn just about those
balls. Which hand goes first, where the hands go, whether
they cross, how the balls are caught, how many are caught at
a time--change one factor, and it transforms the whole
pattern that the balls follow in the air. Sometimes balls
circle like an ocean breaker crashing down on itself; at
other times they seem to soar upward like a fireworks
fountain, or hang suspended in pairs in mid-air. Each
pattern has a name: Waterfall, Columns, Under-the-Leg,
Behind-the-Back, Multiples. Ellis demonstrates one pattern
called "Mill's Mess," in which his hands weave over and
under each other so quickly that they're hard to track.

The number of balls is also a big, big factor. Hassard
has pretty much mastered three balls. But add another ball,
and the pace becomes frenetic, the drops much more frequent.
A master can do five balls. Six balls seem to be pretty much
the practical limit--though one legendary juggler, Enrico
Rastelli, reportedly could do ten.

Each year, six of Hiccup Circus's better students
participate in a show called "Natural High" which tours
schools statewide, preaching an anti-smoking, anti-drug
message. "30 to 40 kids have rotated through the six parts,"
says Ellis. "We've performed on 138 occasions on Kauai,
Maui, Molokai, Oahu, Hawaii and in California...It's a great
peer teaching show, because the kids are performing, and
inspiring other kids to perform--whatever their skills are,
whether it's dancing or drama.... With these kids, it
happens to be circus skills."

Some of those students have gone on to become
professionals. Ellis speaks proudly of Eli Allen, for
instance, who is now working his way through college as
Elron the Gentleman Juggler.

The Hiccup Circus also has another, very special group of
students. "Each year I go over to the cultural festival at
Pu`ukohola Heiau, the heiau at Spencer's Beach, and I teach
juggling there," he says. "We use coconuts for that because
you can't use plastic balls...Ironically, we are considered
to be Westerners with western skills, but actually the
skills that we are practicing are traditional Hawaiian.

Juggling is actually one of the oldest and most universal
of known art forms, dating back at least 4,000 years. The
ancestors of the Polynesians may well have learned it on the
Asian mainland before they began their long migration. When
Captain Cook arrived in Hawaii, his sailors observed
Hawaiians juggling balls of stone or plated leaves,
performing balancing acts on spherical stones, and walking
on stilts. Women in Tonga still juggle as many as six kukui
nuts at once.

Ellis recognizes the pattern that the Tongan women use.
"It's called the Shower pattern," he says.

The universality of juggling is reflected in the makeup
of the Bellyacres residents. Bothe, for instance, was born
in Denmark; Ellis came from England. In 1978, he remembers,
"I was just a school teacher, and one of the Karamozov
Brothers taught me how to juggle, and my life hasn't been
the same since," Ellis grins. "Watch out!"

Bellyacres germinated at the island's third Circus Arts
Festival in 1987. "A group of people said, 'Let's buy a
piece of land together,'" recalls Ellis. The group started
out with a single "yurt"--a round Mongolian-style tent--with
its roof raised somewhat to accommodate flying balls. The
Yurt still stands, though it is seldom used now. The walls
are still painted in bright pastels, with a circus ring-like
star painted in the center of is aging wood floor.

Now the group is planning its biggest change yet. At his
computer, Ellis prints off an artist's rendering of the
performing arts center they hope to build, with classrooms
and a large, open performance space--complete with a high
ceiling, of course.

The farm's ten or so permanent residents eat together at
least once or twice a week at the communal kitchen. All
decisions about running the farm and trust are made by
consensus--100% agreement, not by majority rule. It's all
part of the learning experiment, says Ellis. "How do you get
to point where you can agree? You learn to communicate.
That's hard," he says.

So far, though, they've managed it. And learning to
balance the relationship of 30 human beings may be the
hardest, most satisfying juggling act of all.

"Let's face it," says Ellis. "If a small group of
anarchistic jugglers cannot live and play in harmony, what
hope is there for the other six billion people?"

Authors Note: The above
headline, and all Kama`aina Shopper headlines, were written
by an editor at the Hawaii Tribune Herald, and not by the
author.